Can’t Union-Busters At Least Make Plausible Claims?

Asad Raza‘s post about the NYU grad student strike notes that Sexton is using two of the very silliest arguments that come up when “progressive” university administrators and professors make unions-for-thee-but-not-for-me arguments:

But the sticks are many. By email, Sexton threatened students who choose not to scab tomorrow with the removal of both their ‘stipends’ (pay) and their spring ‘teaching eligibility’ (jobs)–the disaggregation of the two things being a rhetorical strategy meant to preserve the fiction that the stipends do not represent payment for teaching labor, despite the fact that they are disbursed to graduate teachers in the form of paychecks with taxes and social security withheld. Of course, despite the fictive bureaucratese, firing workers for striking is illegal and generally considered a vile form of strike-breaking. In practice it puts NYU’s graduate students in the position of almost all strikers – i.e. without pay.

This one always gets me. Evidently, the idea that the grad students who universities rely on for large percentages of their teaching aren’t workers is so transparently idiotic that there’s not much you can do to defend it, but you have to like the aribtrary division between “stipends” and “teaching eligibility,” as if NYU is really doing students a favor by permitting them to teach. As I’ve said before, if that’s the case, there’s an easy solution: keep the “stipends” and end the “teaching eligibility.” Since grad students aren’t really performing “labor,” I’m sure you won’t notice the difference!

And then there’s this, which some NYU faculty members are latching onto:

But let me offer a counterexample to the view that graduate students are not workers: the fact is, they already are classed as workers at many universities, including all the SUNY schools as well as Rutgers. The only difference is that these universities are public. Is there, then, any significance to the distinction between public and private-university graduate students? I don’t believe that a distinction germane to this issue can be made. Certainly the argument that unions erode collegiality and interfere with internal academic affairs can be dispelled by a glance at Rutgers, where graduate students have been unionized since 1972 without incident. It is also very difficult to deny that working conditions at NYU have improved since unionization. In 2000, students in the English department were paid 12,000 dollars for teaching four classes or discussion sections, with no health benefits. Today, compensation for the same workload is 19,000 dollars plus health coverage. Better working conditions make for better teaching; thus the undergraduates are better served by the union as well. Either we should have a union, or Rutgers shouldn’t. You make the call.

This is right, of course; the idea that there should be less right to organize at private universities makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Grad students instructors don’t suddenly have different jobs because they work at private schools. And when it’s made by professors at private schools, it’s even worse for being so self-serving as well as being illogical. It’s a companion of the argument noted by Dave, where allegedly pro-labor professors say that they’re all in favor of unions…as long as they don’t restrict the discretion of employers in any way whatsoever. Needless to say, the distinction between this position and just being anti-labor is one without a difference, unless one is prepared to defend the claim that negotiated restrictions on management discretion are acceptable only when the management isn’t you.